Course info

Course Description: This subject examines relationships among technology, culture, politics, animals and the (human) body in a range of social settings. In this reading-intensive course, we encounter a few core concepts and theorists relevant to the anthropological study of science and technology. We explore the often unacknowledged political, aesthetic, religious, ethical and embodied aspects of technology and science, and ask how we may study these as sociomaterial practices rather than human mastery over Nature. Specific attention will be paid to contexts of so-called Global South. What hopes, fears, and uncertainties are evoked by the global circulation of science and technology? How are scientific knowledge and technological innovations constantly redrawing the boundaries between Nature and Society? How do new technologies evolve in relation to, and transform imaginations of identity, power, and knowledge? Each session is organized around either analytical core concepts, or anthropological encounters with a distinct thing, field or process, such as the wheelchair, the plastic spoon, the cyborg, stem cells, the cochlear implant, the fingerprint, childbirth. We use these as cases to explore how technology shapes, and is being shaped by, cultural assumptions, utopian imagery, and complex interactions between human and non-human substances and agencies.